Traffic Safety Meeting in Broadview on Thursday

Seattle Department of Transportation’s Neighborhood Traffic Operations (NTO) is hosting a series of traffic safety meetings around the city, for residents concerned about speeding on their residential street.

The next meeting starts at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 14, at the Broadview Public Library, 12755 Greenwood Ave. N.

The meetings will include a power point presentation, with a brief overview of different traffic calming options, what steps a neighborhood must take to be considered for traffic calming, criteria staff use to prioritize projects, and possible funding sources. Residents will also become familiar with the proper use of radar speed guns.

If residents want to enroll their street in the Traffic Calming Program, a representative from their street must attend one of these meetings.

For those who're interested, the city's "traffic calming" program, referenced above, is one reason why people are now complaining about speeding on once-quiet residential streets. These are the stages:

1. Create barriers to the efficient flow of traffic on neighborhood arterials. That's why Phinney/Greenwood in front of my apartment went from four traffic lanes to two. And we were lucky, the scheme often includes sidewalk projections into the street so cars turning right slow the traffic flow down still more.

2. Discovering that traffic on the main streets is choking up, people, especially those going to and from work, begin to divert to side streets. That's the problem we're talking about here.

3. The 'traffic calming' ideologues then push for measures that'll also choke off traffic on those side streets, as this City of Seattle webpage illustrates:

http://www.seattle.gov/transportation/ntcp_com.htm

Note how Big Brotherish the measures are and how they can uglify your street with signs and make it more dangerous for kids by having cars parking on both sides of the street. Nasty stuff.

My own suspicion is that the cause is a simple one. These 'traffic calmers' have computer programs that treat you and I as little bits running around in the computer's memory. That's why they regard slower traffic as 'calmer' traffic. That's the central idea of this foul ideology. Remind yourself of that the next time you're caught in 'calm,' bumper to bumper traffic.

Of course, you and I aren't mindless little computer bits. When we get frustrated by 'traffic calming' on the main thoroughfares, we divert onto side streets. We also tend to get angry and drive a bit more aggressively and less safely. And when we do that, we're simply being human.

Also keep in mind that 'traffic calming' is not only a bad idea, even when it gets discredited in a decade or two, we'll find that it'll take many years and millions of dollars to fix the chokes that this ideology has inserted into our city's traffic flow.

And for those who think I'm being a bit too negative, here's how the Wikipedia article on Traffic Calming begins:

"Traffic calming consists of engineering and other measures put in place on roads for the intention of slowing down or reducing motor-vehicle traffic."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_calming

The article has illustrations of the schemes they're using to make our lives a misery. You've probably been seeing them pop up around Seattle. What follows those schemes are still more schemes to attempt to conceal and coverup the harm created.

For what it's worth, "traffic calming" is still in the 'puff' stages that top-down, social engineering ideas typically go through. It's most politically incorrect to point out what I've just pointed out to you: that traffic calming makes people angry and angry drivers are bad drivers. That's because these people see you and I as things to be manipulated rather than people with lives to be lived.

They want, among other things, to force us to travel via Metro with no regard to the many reasons a car is often more practical, particularly for those with children, shopping to do, and busy lives.

I won't even pretend that they're well-intentioned. All that I've mentioned above is rather obvious. The simplest one-word description of such people is that they're jerks. Unfortunately they're jerks who're:

1. Paid by our taxes.

2. Control the planning of our streets.

Don't look to the Seattle media for help either. I had an email exchange with a reporter who covers such topics. He made it clear to me that he is doing to his best to keep criticism of traffic calming out of the Seattle Times.

For what it's worth, I drive little and walk almost everywhere I need to go. I simply don't like dehumanizing ideologues, particularly when they are in positions of power.

You might want to go this this meeting and, in the words of Harry Truman, "Give them hell."